Posted by Raphael on Sep 15, 2011 in Design Finds, Inspiration, My Business Adventures, Personal, Webdesign | 0 comments

I’ve been having this discussion with my brother recently about usability in web design. I know…a bit of a geeky conversation, but since my brother and I have overlapped in some areas of our careers, it was just another thing that we talked about.

It all started out when he sent me a pretty cool collection of CSS scrolling websites. This type of technique has been around a while now, but the effect in combination with some of the newer HTML5/CSS stuff involving parallax effects makes some pretty fun things happen.

Now my argument was that these sites, like the “Art of Flight” one above, was really neat from a visual standpoint, but super annoying when it came down to how effective it was as a user interface — it threw me off for a good few seconds trying to correlate how the site seemed to be moving in odd directions that had no correspondance to the movement of my trackpad/mouse.

You might argue, well, why can’t you simply depend on the menu items to guide you from place to place on the site…how hard is that?  I guess that’s exactly what the designers are banking on here. But that’s sacrificing quite a bit of usability in favor of a “wow” factor. That 2 or 3 seconds of frustration from a user could mean a bounce off your site.

I’d much rather have a simple vertical scrolling site like NikeBetterWorld that requires no interface concerns at all…yet still gets props for being visually appealing to look at.